Friday, February 13, 2004

A right wing quandary

But the chairman of an allied organization, Wendy Chavkin of Physicians for Reproductive Health Choice, said the subpoenas were cause for grave concern.

"Not only is this Justice Department and this attorney general profoundly anti-abortion, but they have a questionable commitment to civil liberties," Chavkin said.

She said the subpoenas seemed to be a tactic of intimidation comparable to a subpoena issued recently in a federal grand jury probe ordering Drake University to turn over names of certain anti-war activists.

I would imagine it's hard to avoid being a total fucking hypocrite (not to mention a LIAR when he paraphrases the attorneys thusly:"we don't want their identities, what we want is the doctors' names who are performing these operations because it's against the law.", because they did not SUBPEONA the records to get the DOCTORS' names, the doctors are the ones who brought the case in the first place.) in that case, even though Rush is a criminal (and we all know how Rush feels about criminals) and the women who received the abortions are not on trial, nor should they be.

I'm thinking there's more to this than just Rush and drugs and abortion and medical records and big brother, though. Last night, on one of the NPR shows, there was a distinction made about medical records of prescription drug users - how those records need to be protected because we can't have people in pain avoiding treatment because they fear they will be outed as prescription drug users. Well, what about a woman who needs an abortion? I suppose it doesn't matter what she fears. I suppose it's more about "embarrassment" as so sexistly put forward at the end of this article.

"If there's a law, it should be followed," DeCook said. "It can be enforced without embarrassing the woman by dragging her name out in public."

Because, you know, it's a fight for our inherent rights to demand our addictions be kept secret, but it's a fight for mere personal pride if we would rather not reveal our medical histories pertaining to our right to choose.